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St
Andrew, Stokesby

The
remoteness of Norfolk is enabled by the way the
long, slow determined rivers draw it up into
self-contained areas, introspective and insular.
It is often a job to remind yourself that we are,
after all, barely 150 miles from central London.
The rivers give Norfolk its character, and make
it so different from soft, mystical Suffolk to
the south. In the east of Norfolk the rivers form
the Broads system, dividing the area into parts
which are almost completely separate, apart from
the handful of roads which connect them. The
downside of this is that these roads are often
very busy, particularly in late summer when the
Broads holiday makers vie with the harvesting
farmers, but if you are a cyclist I fear there is
no alternative but to take them.

Thus, to
reach pretty Stokesby from Acle railway station
you need to take the fast, dangerous Stalham
road. The turn-off comes as something of a
relief, and it was with great pleasure that, on
one of those extraordinary hot days in April
2011, the temperature bobbing around the high
seventies, I found myself pedalling away from all
the madness into silence and birdsong.

Stokesby,
when you reach it, is delightful. The village is
on the edge of the Flegg, at one time a proper
island at the rivers' mouths, and peculiar in
that its control in the 9th Century by Norse
settlers appears to have been pretty complete.
Virtually every placename around here takes a
Viking form rather than a Saxon one.

Stokesby
reached its peak in the 18th Century, its particular
character marked by the surprisingly large number of
buildings of the time. Sitting as it does on the river,
it must have been a busy place then, and the village
green, almost surreally, lies beside the river, with the
sails of boats a background to the children playing.
There's a good pub, too. Within the heart of the village
there is a good 20th Century Methodist chapel, now a
private house, and a windmill, but for the medieval
parish church we must cycle on through the village and
out on the road to Runham (obviously once a slightly
fearful Saxon outpost).

Can there
be any more idyllic setting in Norfolk for a churchyard
than this one, set on a tree-surrounded rise looking out
across its lovely village with the river beyond? In April
the trees were not yet in full leaf, despite the heat,
and the church appeared as a citadel above the ploughed
fields, but in summer it must disappear completely. And
imagine what it must be like to be here on a stormy
autumn night, with the wind blowing all the way from
Denmark!

Like so
many around here, St Andrew is basically a Norman church,
but patched up and elaborated in a small way so much over
the centuries that not much survives of its Norman
origins. However, the whole piece is very picturesque.
There was a big restoration in the late 1850s, when
architects tended to be rather more enthusiastic than
careful, so, thanks to the welcoming notice and the open
door, you step into what is broadly speaking a typically
rural Victorian church. However, there are plenty of
earlier survivals, and the best of these are collected
together at the west end, the very fine 15th Century
bench ends. A woman in a headdress kneels at a prieu-dieu
to say her prayers - if you look closely, you will see
that her rosary is draped across the desk. There is a
rugged cockatrice, a comical dragon and a very noble
greyhound.

If you
left the south door open to more easily examine the bench
ends, do take a look at the inside face of it when you
close it, because there is a great curiosity, a
semi-circular set of royal arms to Victoria set upon it.
It seems very awkward, and cannot have been intended for
its setting, unless of course it was made locally with
materials to hand - could it have been painted on half of
a barrel end?

The other
great survival here is the collection of brasses, some in
the nave and some in the chancel. They date from the end
of the 15th Century to the middle of the 16th Century,
crossing the Reformation divide, and provide an
instructive guide to both military and academic dress of
the time. Several are to the Clere family.

Set
on the north side of the sanctuary is a
beautifully worded mid-19th Century memorial,
though in an earlier style, which records that it
was placed to perpetuate for a few fleeting
years the memory of William Taylor Worship.
The aptly-named Worship was a clergyman at
Beeston St Lawrence near Norwich and at Holton St
Peter near Halesworth in Suffolk, but the
days of his childhood were passed at the home of
his father in the adjoining parish of Runham.

The
memorial does not say what caused his death, but
it must have been something pretty bad, because what
pain and the wasting sore have left of him is
deposited with some of his nearest and dearest in
a vault hard by. The 1840s was just at the
beginning of the Catholic revival in the Church
of England, and prayers for the dead were still
anathema, of course; but Worship makes a special
plea: Reader, offer, it may not be a prayer,
at least a kind wish for the welfare of his soul.
Amen to that.